A while ago we had two fresh grads hired as junior programmers. After - literally - two months, one asked when she would be promoted to a senior programmer. I replied, when you don't need senior programmer to help you with all your work.

and am soooo pleased to be rid of the other ISPs I've been stuck with in the past.

And of course *the moment* Google rolled out in this area, a bunch of other ISPs magically offered a competitive 1Gbps fiber plan as well.

Too late—you had me. And you pissed me off. And now I'm gone.

This is a pretty transparent proposal to immediately cap speeds, then approach platforms for extortion money based on user demand.

In short, it's exactly the same thing. The words have changed, but the idea about what to do with the cables is the same.

Boeing announced that it will do this under a new company named "Uber Lyft".

Fixed that for them.

... employees with STEM degrees have critical thinking skills *and* STEM degrees. Just sayin'.

Maybe I'm dating myself here, but multiplayer games are still newfangled and weird to me, and I don't know if that will ever change.

When I used to play games, I played to get away from social interaction and enjoy myself in isolation. It was a kind of recuperation. A world of gaming in which you have to face social interaction once again as part of gameplay was unattractive enough to me that I stopped playing games altogether. These days I mainly do crossword puzzles and read e-books for the respite that I used to get from gaming.

You can't backup everything that's on the phone.

Your process sounds great to a technology-enabled person. But for mere humans?

They don't remember their Apple ID password.
They put in random answers to security questions for password recovery.
Their email address has changed, their computer has changed, etc.
They installed all that music, all those videos, and all those apps, like, a *year* ago or more. Who remembers how?

"Can't you just copy everything from my old phone over to my new phone?"

As you say, the process ends up being:

Initialize the phone as new, to their current computer.
Create a new Apple ID and sign them in.
Install and position all the apps one by one by looking at their old phone as you hold it.
Get ahold of all the music that they already bought in some other format so that they don't have to pay for it again.
Give them the bad news about what can't be tracked down/reinstalled (apps no longer in app store, music that can't be found elsewhere without re-buying, etc.)

I could have sworn that in a recent case, we lost all of SMS and she was upset about that, but may I'm remembering incorrectly. Still, the process is onerous.

It pisses people off—"You mean I can't just move all of *my* stuff from my old phone to my new phone? Why do they call it an *upgrade?*"

I'm not saying they're right. Sure, they should remember their passwords, take care of their online identities, etc.

But the fact is that you cannot simply do this:

1. Connect old iPhone to computer
2. Back up full contents
3. Connect new iPhone to computer
4. Restore full contents

I've been on to Apple a couple of times with people standing next to me while I try to act as an intermediary, and the people on the other end of the line end up just throwing their hands up, apologizing, and saying they can't help.

To be fair, this isn't exactly easy on Android either. But it's slightly easier. And both platforms need to seriously work on it.

Exactly. Plants learned *that* lesson long before we did with the Hindenburg. (If you listen very carefully to the video, you can hear all the plants laughing at our naiveté in the background.)

if the computer + iTunes is newer than the phone. Try this:

-> Plug a full, everyday-used iPhone that was backed up or set up on an old computer
-> Into a new computer where it has never been backed up before

What you will get is an option to erase the phone and start over. You will not get the option to back up the phone, and Apple says that's by design—the licensed content on the phone is tied to the iTunes installation where it was set up, and the license can't be associated with a new iTunes.

Problem is that people that ask me for help have almost invariably either bought a new computer or reinstalled Windows since the time they set up their phone. So there is no way to create a backup—when you plug the phone in, you only get the option to erase the phone and set it up new.

seamlessly? I have family members asking me to help with their iPhones routinely, and this is always a nightmare.

Is it just a matter of your having one stable iTunes installation over the entire period? Because the problem that I run into over and over again is that iCloud is either partial in its backing up and/or doesn't have enough space and thus doesn't back everything up, and they have invariably got a computer that's newer than their iPhone. As a result, their iPhone has never been backed up to iTunes, and when they ask me to help with a transition, I can't help them—iTunes simply offers to erase the phone when you plug it in since the phone predates the iTunes installation.

So we end up having to do a phone side-by-side—check each item installed on the old phone, then install and position it again on the new phone, one-by-one. Takes hours, and some things (SMS messages) are just plain lost. I'd love to find a way to just migrate one iPhone to the next with a click, but so far I haven't found it—the only way to do this appears to be to have an iTunes installation that predates your original phone and to which the phone has been synchronized since it was new. Then you can restore the backup to the new phone. But if the iTunes installation is newer than old phone, as far as I can tell users are SOL for easy transitions.

And most everyone I've helped to upgrade simply doesn't have this. Most of them don't even use iTunes at all.

The British already did this in 1854 - duh. There were even poems about it.

That was certainly Steve Ballmer's approach.

Increasingly intelligent? No, there are no selective pressures for this. As to families of simply intelligent people? That is rather easy, this is called upper-middle class and the lack of social mobility.

If you want to read up on this, start with studies on Ashkenazi Jews.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

You are technically correct on one point, this study did not look into broad question of heritability of intelligence. They only looked into specific genes linked to specific traits associated with some aspects of intelligence. From the general body of knowledge we also know that these genes would be heritable.

Since we are nitpicking, you are also incorrect by stating that "the predictive utility of what they have discovered" - they have not performed exhaustive search for all genes that would positively and negatively impact memory and learning, as such it is still only a correlation.